The United States
plans to transform the infrastructure of Iraq within a year of a war
ending, but has sidelined aid agencies by allocating almost all the funds
available to private American firms.

Non-governmental organisations and the UN would get just $50m, a tiny
fraction of the $1.5bn being offered to private companies, according to
more than 100 pages of confidential contract documents leaked to the Wall
Street Journal.

In the Azores at the weekend, President George Bush emphasised the need
for a significant UN role in a postwar Iraq, a stance the administration
considers essential to maintaining some degree of multilateral backing for
military action and its aftermath.

But Washington's plan - backed by a request for cash that the White
House is expected to submit to Congress soon - envisages a rapid
reconstruction process led by US corporations, repairing Iraq's
infrastructure and reforming its educational, healthcare and financial
systems, with many results evident before a year has passed.

US administration officials would act as "shadow ministers", keeping a
close eye on Iraq's new government.

The UN development programme, which has traditionally coordinated many
postwar rebuilding schemes, estimates that reconstruction could cost $10bn
a year, over at least three years - whereas the request to Congress is
expected to demand a total of $1.8bn for reconstruction in the first year,
and $800m for humanitarian assistance, the Journal reported.

Washington has restricted the initial bidding process - for contracts
worth $900m - to American firms, invoking emergency regulations that allow
companies to sidestep the usual open procedures.

A subsidiary of Halliburton, the firm formerly headed by the US
vice-president, Dick Cheney, is a member of one of four consortia whose
bids were invited in a secret process last month. Several of the firms are
major Republican party donors.

The Bush administration intends to make sure the Iraqi people know that
the US has taken the central role in rebuilding, in an effort to shore up
public opinion there, the leaked documents suggest.

Officials at USAID, the government department coordinating the plan,
believe that a more multilateral approach could see projects getting
bogged down.

Ellen Yount, a USAID spokesperson, said non-American firms were not
excluded from the process because they could serve in subcontract roles,
and might be candidates for future bidding rounds.

The USAID plans have been roundly condemned by NGOs and representatives
of the EU and UN.

Mark Malloch Brown, head of the UN development programme, said the
one-year deadline "flies in the face of human history," while Chris
Patten, the EU's external affairs commissioner, has called the US approach
"exceptionally maladroit".